Catching sharks

Wellington College teacher Andrea Shaw gets up close and personal with some sharks.

Transcript

Mrs Andrea Shaw (New Zealand Science, Mathematics & Technology Teacher Fellow, 2006)

This is a video clip from my Australian trip, when I went on a research trip where they were trying to collect some shark fin clips for doing some chemical analysis to work out what kinds of species they were eating.

This is the method - they brought the grey reef sharks onto the back of the boat so they could take the fin clip. They were collecting information from their sharks in various ways, by bringing the sharks up onto the back of the duckboard and taking a fin clip, or actually catching them under the water and taking a fin clip using a bus-driver’s ticket clipper.

They just go up to the dorsal fin and take a very small sample out of it, they punch it out.

The word is out that I’m obviously needing sharks… [for DNA analysis for the Fish-Bol project I’m working on].